Friday, September 19, 2008

Administration Hobby
Previews

I
didn't much care for the whole biking thing, either.

A
TALE OF TWO TICKETS. It's inevitable that one pair of candidates or
the other is going to get elected, and we'll get subjected to the usual
partisan political fights and screw-ups. What's probably harder to
remember right now is that we'll also get bombarded with a lot of
stories about what the first and second families do to amuse themselves
in their leisure hours.

Do you remember? Sure you do. The Kennedy touch football games. LBJ hoisting
his beagle by the ears and showing off his gall bladder surgery scar.
Jimmy Carter just sitting there in his frumpy cardigan with that look
on his face. Reagan riding horses with his big cowboy hat on. Clinton
spraining his knee at Greg Norman's house chasing another piece of tailMcDonald's cherry
pie. George Bush the Elder skydiving and George the Younger
chain-sawing sticks at the ranch and falling off his mountain
bike. Even vice presidents afflict us with their hobbies. Who can
forget Dick Cheney shooting one of his pheasant-hunting friends in the
face? Spouses, too. Jackie wanted to redecorate everything in sight,
and Nancy Reagan spent most of her free time with fortunetellers and
astrologers. Lynn Cheney writes children's books. Ugh. Are you ready
for the four years of puff pieces you'll have to endure depending on
who we vote into office this November?

You haven't thought about it, have you? Here's a preview. It's not
meant to prejudice your vote. There's good and bad on both sides. But
who you prefer in the off-hours probably says as much about you as your
politics. That's why it's worth looking at.

The Obamas are probably reassuring to the smartest people, as you might
expect. Here's a hint about her favorite leisure time pursuit from
Michelle, courtesy of the prestigious national news and commentary journal Seventeen
Magazine.

On her Facebook page, she lists her
interests as "Being a mom, Sudoko."[sic]

Cool.

It's meta-linguistic. Like Pachinko.
Without all the racket.

And from the same source we also learn what hubby Barack likes best.

According to Barack, Michelle doesn't
like to play Scrabble. Why? She's very competitive, he says, and "I
usually beat her, and I tend to gloat."

Should he let her win occasionally? No. But he should be more gracious about it. I think. We wouldn't want her to get the idea that everyday American life is somehow mean.

He'll
probably stop gloating after he wins the presidency.

All very cosmopolitan, to be sure. Very little chance of seeing
bandaids and carefully phrased medical press conferences after a lost
weekend of Sudoku and Scrabble. The Bidens, on the other hand, will tend to remind us of our
physical frailties and vulnerabilities. Joe doesn't play sports at his
age, but he does have a rejuvenation regimen that's bound to attract
tons of attention after he becomes vice president.

Who knew? You've
got to believe. Then comes Viagra.

Maybe the gush of media coverage about hair plugs will be good news for a lot of guys who
were too shy or embarrassed to look into the available options. And
Joe's wife Jill
also has a positive use for her free time. She has her
own Breast
Health Initiative, which so far hasn't got the glowing
reviews it deserves, but I think we're safe in saying that if the
Obama-Biden ticket wins, we won't be able to walk down the street
without hearing how to give ourselves a breast self-exam.

It's ALL good. Seriously.

So, with the Dems, we'll get our lives enhanced by a bunch of numbers,
words, rejuvenation schemes and cancer prevention. Pretty elevating
stuff. Especially when you compare it to what the Repubs will probably
batter us with. Let's face it. A McCain-Palin administration would be a
lot noisier than the
refined and helpful hobbies of the Obama-Biden administration.

Forget Cindy McCain's $300,000 convention outfit. This woman is a
maniac in her free time. She builds and drives drift racers. Just when
you're about to nod off waiting for the weather report during the local
late news, you'll probably be blasted out of your warm doze by
footage like this:

Is
this really what we want middle-aged women doing? Me,I'm votiing 'Present.' Does she truly
know how to heel-toe?

Of course, it's also possible you won't miss the weather report for
once. But this is only the beginning. John McCain was an honest-to-God
naval aviator, which means we're going to see a whole new emphasis on
archaic show-off displays like this:

You know I'm
right... The Blue Angels will be fixtures in the
Lincoln bedroom. They'll probably replace the Secret Service.

I'm not sure our ears will be able to stand the strain. Worse, none of
the high-decibel McCain extravaganza will do anything to prepare us for
the quiet, murderous stalking of Sarah Palin on the hunt for a moose:

No,
I didn't show a kill. Don't want to.

And then there's snow machine dude. How sick do you think we're going
to get of features, reportage, and melodramatic cinematography like
this?

So
it looks cool. This time. Think hundreds of times.

Plenty is my guess. But the decision is up to you. Up to all of us, actually. Choose wisely.

Hah.

P.S. I
was definitely not trying to
give the impresson that the Obamas and Bidens aren't athletic.
Michelle, for example, is on record as saying that she likes to run on
her treadmill. That can be athletic, right?

Sure it can.

posted at
2:28 pm
by
CountryPunk

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Why Palin is
"Ready"

This
isn't a form of rape?
What worse thing could you do to a male candidate?

YUP,
SHE'S A WOMAN. I wrote the other day about the Babar
Conservatives who
haughtily inform us that in their considered opinion, Sarah Palin is
not ready to be Vice President of the United States. As I reread the
post, I spent too much time on it. Here's a better one.

She's ready. The biggest and most important qualification for the
presidency of the United States has become, thanks to the MSM, an
ability to endure inhumanly savage and filthy personal attacks and
still do your job. The
fact that such attacks are automatically easier and more damaging to
inflict on a woman than a man
is a big part of the reason women are still not permitted (officially,
at least) combat roles in the U.S. military. It is, for example, a
given that women can be subjected to the physical and psychological
torture of gang rape if
captured, while it remains an unlikely possibility for male U.S. troops
unless they're captured in San Francisco.

Here's the irony. While David Brooks and his oh-so-refined fellow
skeptics have been parsing the gaps in her state department jargon,
Sarah
Palin has been undergoing a metaphorical gang rape by the colleagues
(of both sexes)
they sup with in the Capitol's finest restaurants. Yet she's still
here. When asked, she stepped up to the challenge of running the
gauntlet any Republican VP pick would have had to run this year. In
response, the "liberals" and the feminists have invaded
her life and her
person to a degree that should be repellent to every American citizen.
The SNL skit aside, the sexist innuendoes about Hillary pale in
comparison to what has been done to Sarah
Palin. Any day now, I expect
Chris Olbermann to solemnly demand a live, televised internal exam of
Sarah Palin so that we can all be assured that she is indeed a woman
and not a white
supremacist militia conspirator in drag. "If she
won't put her feet in the stirrups, what is she trying to hide? Let's
all look inside her vagina so
we can decide for ourselves." The
New York Times, the Washington
Post, Time, and, of
course, The Philadelphia Enquirer
(not a typo) will consider it a reasonable request. Speaking of pigs
who try to disguise themselves with lipstick...

But she's still here. Still smiling and doing her job in support of the
ticket. This woman has more guts than any single other person you
have ever met. And what is the biggest challenge of being President of
the United States? Withstanding all the pressure, polls, abuse, and
libel you receive while you make decisions that affect the well being
of everyone
in the world. Making the decisions honestly requires good information
from your flunkies and common sense. The hard part is finding someone
who can make right decisions that are unpopular. Sarah Palin has
already passed that test. Bring on Putin,
Ahdumjihad,
and Kim
Il Dong.
She'll make mincemeat of them.

I always thought this movie, and this scene, were ridiculous.

I've changed my mind. I wish I had even half the courage Sarah Palin
has already shown America. David Brooks and Ross Douthat are pussies.
Meaning no disrespect to Mrs. Palin (to whom I apologize for the bad
language). Now, can we get on with the election? You know the one.
John "They broke my arms and all my teeth" McCain versus Barack
"I'm so nervous without a teleprompter" Obama.

UPDATE.
In a startlingly immediate fulfillment of prophecy, New York comedienne
Sandra Bernhard has added the explicit threat of gang rape to the
left's bombardment of Sarah Palin. She avers that Mrs. Palin should
stay out of New York City unless she wants to be gang-raped
by Berhnard's black "brothers." A funny joke? Here's an event just referenced by
Rush Limbaugh which explains what constitutes humor In Bernhard's set.
No pictures. Just words. Still
NSFW.

posted at
11:02 am
by
InstaPunk

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

YouTube Wednesday:

Putting You in the
Mood

Liking the audio wasn't part of the
plan. But we do.

WODEN'S
DAY. Now that the
New Great Depression is upon us, it's time to
think
about how we'll survive the next four months till Barack Obama gets
inaugurated and fixes everything in a few days. I don't mind
telling you it's going to be quite a shock. We'll all have to move out
of our Manhattan penthouses and look for work somewhere away from Wall
Street. There aren't any real instruction manuals for a cataclysm of
this sort. Will there be enough gas for our BMW SUVs? And will there be
batteries for our Ipods and Blackberries? Nobody seems to know.

But necessity is the mother of invention, as they say, so I decided to
look for guidance in the movies. That first Great Depression has been
covered pretty thoroughly in the movies, it turns out, and it's
possible there are some survival strategies we could adapt for
ourselves even if they didn't have things nearly as bad in the old
days, what with their mere 90 percent decline in the stock market,
their piddling 25 percent unemployment rate, and their more manageable
50 percent mortgage default rate. We'll just have to do the best
we can.

It looks like there are three main ways of surviving a depression to
pick from, according to Hollywood.

1. Get Adopted by the Well-to-Do

The first and perhaps best way is to figure out how to hang around with
rich society folks and movie stars even though you personally don't
have any money. That's what William Powell did in My Man Godfrey, and we all know how
smart he was.

Just
being around money makes it rub off on you.

A variation of this is becoming a kind of star yourself by being famous
for what a great symbol you are of the problems and aspirations of
the common man. That gets you invited to places where the food and
drink is exceptionally good, and beautiful women start to admire
you for just being there. Like Gary Cooper did in Meet John Doe.

Heck,
he wound up with a Barbara of his own.

Come to think of it, Obama demonstrated this approach just last night
at his $28,500
a plate dinner in Hollywood. I mean, if you can't
actually be Barbra Streisand, be
her lapdog instead. It sure beats handing out MREs to homeless wretches
in south Texas or distributing chits for free shoeshines to the newly
unemployed at the Lehmann Brothers Tent City Center.

2. Become a Sports or Entertainment
Sensation.

This one has the disadvantage of requiring you to possess some natural
talent and determination to excel in a way that people can easily
recognize. But you don't need a fancy resume or much in the way of
educational credentials. Like Russell Crowe showed us in Cinderella Man.

We didn't say it
was easy. You've got to take some punishment.

Actually, though, you don't even have to be a human being for this one.
But it helps to know some who have the guts and faith to believe in you against all odds.

Did
we mention the punishment? Like even a couple broken legs.

Some of you will already be edging toward the show business line. The
news isn't all good there, either. For example it's possible to be good
and likeable and all, and still fail to become an international
sensation. Like Clint Eastwood showed us in Honkytonk Man.

I
doubt if anybody even paid a cover charge.

You've got a bettter chance if you lay off the smokes and have a great
national health insurance program to cure your tuberculosis before the
big recording session. Still, the truth is, you could easily wind up six
feet under with nothing to show for it.

As you can see, relying on talent and resolve is a very mixed bag.

3. Get Moving and Keep Moving. If You
Have to, RUN.

Sometimes the only available option is to get the hell out of the house
and down the road. You can fill up the 4WD gearbox of your SUV with
sawdust and set out for Oz with your "BP likes windmills" roadmap to guide you. Or if you don't have a car
anymore, hop a freight train. That's what Preston Sturges taught us in
his great movie Sullivan's Travels.
As bad as it sounds, you might hook up with Veronica Lake, which is a
jackpot all its own.

That's
Joel McCrea with her. The lucky bum.

Of course, things don't always go completely, sbsolutely perfect for
Joel in this movie, despite the Veronica angle. Freight trains sometimes contain
shady characters with clubs (the bludgeon kind, not the golf kind). A
lot of you may want to pass up the train option. But cheer up. Even if
you don't have a car, there's nothing that says you can't steal one,

That
Bonnie was a pip, wasn't she?

However. A life of crime is sometimes directly associated with a death
of crime. Just so you know. Which is why maybe it's better to keep
a
low profile and just follow along as best you can to wherever everybody
else seems to be going. Like to California, where they have the very
best health and welfare programs for the indigent in the whole damn
country. And lots of cameramen to boot. Who can capture your big
personal sob story on film and make you an icon among pitiful losers
for the rest of time. That's why there isn't anybody anywhere who
hasn't seen Henry Fonda shake his trembling finger at fate in The Grapes of Wrath.

His
daughter went on to become a famous movie star. See?

Didn't Michelle Obama say something similar about the country's
unfeeling oppression on the subject of Princeton student loans? Well,
there you go. She's famous, right? And she's definitely ready to
weather our imminent New Great Depression. That's why we've got to
elect her husband pretty damn quick if we don't want to get caught
speechless in the new normal. We need to be ready, too. We need an
immediate government program to supply us all with our own
teleprompters
so we can beg for help in the most affecting
possible way. And we're going to need lots of practice. Which is why
it's so helpful that South Park
anticipated the "running like hell" strategy more than a year ago. Watch.
Practice. Act out. It's the new WPA.

It
brings tears to our eyes.

We can do this. I know we can. No, don't thank me. Thank Hollywood.

COMING CLEAN.
Don't want anybody to get the wrong idea. We love all these movies. Every one of them
is worth watching. The ones from the thirties are delightful and
upbeat, which was appropriate to a time of pain and despair. Of the
later ones, only Bonnie and Clyde
seems dated, mired in the usual '60s anti-establishment swamp. The
three newer ones are excellent. Eastwood's Honkytonk Man is surprisingly
affecting and effective. Cinderella
Man keeps getting better on subsequent viewings, which is rare
indeed. And Seabiscuit. Uh,
apologies, but we're animal people here, and specifically horse people
who disapprove of racing in a big way (still angrily grieving for
Barbaro), but I love this movie so much I'm going to watch it again
tonight. The divine spirit moves and it fills all who can accept it
with an ocean of light. A thousand bucks on the midget horse to waste
War Admiral's ass. Any takers? What if I told you War Admiral has
degrees from Harvard,
Yale and Princeton?
Thought not.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Well, this is interesting. David
Brooks of the New York Times
has published today an amazingly candid summary of the elitist
Republican argument against Sarah Palin. It begins:

The narrow question is this: Is Sarah
Palin qualified to be vice president? Most conservatives say yes, on
the grounds that something that feels so good could not possibly be
wrong. But a few commentators, like George Will, Charles Krauthammer,
David Frum and Ross Douthat demur, suggesting in different ways that
she is unready.

The issue starts with an evaluation of Palin, but does not end there.
This argument also is over what qualities the country needs in a leader
and what are the ultimate sources of wisdom.

There was a time when conservatives did not argue about this.
Conservatism was once a frankly elitist movement. Conservatives stood
against radical egalitarianism and the destruction of rigorous
standards. They stood up for classical education, hard-earned
knowledge, experience and prudence. Wisdom was acquired through
immersion in the best that has been thought and said.

Harrumph. For the moment I'll defer making the point that in his intro
he's asserting what is at best a half-truth and give you the key points
of his highbrow argument, which he gets to after an interval of
belittling the legitimacy and effectiveness of the more recent
tradition of so-called populist conservatism.

In the current Weekly Standard, Steven
Hayward argues that the nation's founders wanted uncertified citizens
to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a
separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted
people like Palin.

I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn't just lived through
the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it
was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.

And the problem with this attitude is that, especially in his first
term, it made Bush inept at governance. It turns out that governance,
the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired
skills. Most of all, it requires prudence.

What is prudence? It is the ability to grasp the unique pattern of a
specific situation. It is the ability to absorb the vast flow of
information and still discern the essential current of events -- the
things that go together and the things that will never go together. It
is the ability to engage in complex deliberations and feel which
arguments have the most weight.

How is prudence acquired? Through experience. The prudent leader
possesses a repertoire of events, through personal involvement or the
study of history, and can apply those models to current circumstances
to judge what is important and what is not, who can be persuaded and
who can't, what has worked and what hasn't.

He goes on, of course, to point out that George W. Bush and Sarah Palin
don't possess these attainments, and he is therefore able to conclude:

The idea that "the people" will take on
and destroy "the establishment" is a utopian fantasy that corrupted the
left before it corrupted the right. Surely the response to the current
crisis of authority is not to throw away standards of experience and
prudence, but to select leaders who have those qualities but not the
smug condescension that has so marked the reaction to the Palin
nomination in the first place.

I'm grateful for such directness. As grateful as I am amused by his
expressed discomfort about "the smug condescension" of others to the Palin nomination.

The only problem with his argument is that it's wrong in almost every
particular. It bespeaks a peculiarly parochial point of view that is
frankly out of touch with the roots of post-FDR political conservatism
and with the broad swath of the American people who support it.

Before I explain this further, I think it's important to take a closer
look at the people Brooks cited as subscribing to his own views of
Palin. They have more in common than you'd think, enough, in fact, to
constitute their own little demographic. David Brooks is a
Canadian-American educated at the University of Chicago. Charles
Krauthammer was born in New York to French parents and received his
undergraduate education at McGill University in Canada before going on
to Oxford and then the Harvard Medical School. George Will also took a
degree at Oxford before finishing up at Princeton. David Frum was
born in Canada and took his degrees at Yale and Harvard. Ross Douthat
is the baby of the bunch, a 2002 graduate of Harvard. Geez. Travel.
Internationalism. Universities where 700 SATs are just the starting
point. The post-imperialist sophistication of Canada and the U.K.
Windsor collars and cufflinks. Cool.

No, I'm not arguing that they're unqualified to comment. They're smart,
accomplished men (though one of them can hardly be considered to have the
"experience" required to pass judgment on a woman almost 20 years his senior, n'est-ce pas?). It's just
that when they step forward to tell the rest of us what it means to be
an American conservative, I can't help wondering if what they really
are is Tories. You know, the
colonial elite who understood that the American Revolution was
misbegotten and doomed to disaster because it lacked "standards
of prudence and experience," meaning that it was much much better to
trust the King. A lot of the Tories were so convinced of their
connection to "ultimate sources of wisdom" that they fled the American
colonies for the more civilized provinces of Canada. And were never
heard from again. Until lately, that is.

I apologize for mocking them, but I also think they deserve it. The
hyper-intellectual brand of American conservatism in the twentieth
century has always seemed to me to be taking more credit than they ever
earned for the Reagan Revolution. Think of it as National Review
Disease, or the Buckley Bullshit. Just the other day, Brooks devoted a
column to trashing
the Goldwater conservatism which found the political legs to
run down the defeatist moderate Republicanism Brooks and Douthat in
particular now seem to be peddling as the best chance for a negotiated
peace settlement with the socialist left. (Sorry, I can't really
pretend to have any respect for Douthat. He's just an ambitious, self-important
pup for now, unlike the others on this list.) The Tory
conservatives continue to think twentieth century conservatism began
with Buckley. It didn't. It began with a lot of hard-working Americans
whose traditional middle-class values were violently offended by the
gross egalitarian excesses of FDR, a president they despised as deeply
as today's cartoon leftists hate George W. Bush.

What Buckley brought to the table was not
the first expression of disbelief in the rightness of a continuously
expanding federal government, but the charm of a Talleyrand. He could
not reverse the political currents in which he moved, but he could ride
them to personal success and even acclaim. He could debate John Kenneth
Galbraith and company without becoming physically ill. He could
separate his political convictions from the life and death stakes they
represented to those who never took tea with the confiscatory,
communist-appeasing elites. He therefore succeeded in creating a
conservative voice that was permitted to coexist with the
overwhelmingly dominant liberal intellectual hierarchy which ruled both
houses of congress and the government's purse strings for a span of 48
years, less one brief hiccup in the moderate Eisenhower administration.
Buckley was, in short, a gadfly. The barbarian admitted to polite
society on the strength of his many elite credentials -- learning,
wealth, travel, gracious civility, and (consequently) harmlessness.

But the real conservative movement in this country was never a function
of the elites. It came from the west, from Goldwater and Reagan. Its
whole ascendancy was fueled by a new
kind of populism, the common voices of the competent -- those who knew
they were doing the real work and creating all the wealth that
government wanted to take and redistribute to those who demanded it
most plaintively. That's a huge difference from the old-style populism
Brooks is trying to lump conservatives into, the Huey Long or William
Jennings Bryan (or John Edwards) variety that appeals to those who believe they are
helpless victims of a power structure so entrenched they never have a
chance to get out from under without a dispenser of booty focused
exclusively on them. The populism of the conservative movement that
took the White House and congress from the Democrats in 1980 had one
simple message "Get government off our backs so we can live our own
lives and make our own decisions."

And this is a kind of populism the intellectual and social elites of
the Tory class can never comprehend. It's not their fault particularly,
but it skews their perceptions in fatal ways. Their lives have been too
much governed by the process of getting good grades. In the social,
academic, and organizational milieus in which they move, opportunity is
achieved by the approval of others in a hierarchy. Talent is not
immaterial but it's never a direct shortcut. In the world of writing,
talking, and thinking, there is no such thing as the better mousetrap.
However privileged they seem, the real power elites are always company
men, mentored and tested for obedience and the key social graces before
they can be accorded real responsibility or power. They learn how far
and how hard they can push against the establishment, which forever
afterwards governs their sense of what is possible.

That's why there's nothing in their experience to justify the meteoric
rise of a Sarah Palin or for that matter a Bill Clinton or a Barack
Obama. If these folks had been running the smoke-filled rooms in 1976,
they would have sided with Gerald Ford against Ronald Reagan without a
second thought. Prudence. Experience. The most you can expect is crumbs from the table of the Dems and an occasional nod of respect. To earn even this, you must cultivate the measured endorsements of the
gray eminences the Tories respect so much more than ordinary people. The fact is, they're as infatuated by the Dem political class as the New Deal coalition of common folk they look down on as much as they look down on rank-and-file Republicans from Texas and, yup, Alaska.

But they're wrong about most of what they assume to be bedrock wisdom.
In the America they've never been a part of, inexperienced talents like
Bill Gates come out of nowhere and take down invulnerable gray giants
like IBM. Ronald Reagan comes from Eureka College and Hollywood to win
the Cold War, slash taxes, and restore American pride. George W. Bush
comes from Texas, not Andover, and does a better
job in his first term than in his second hurling back the menace
of al qaeda and Islamic hatred, despite a timid European consensus ruled by the
prudence and experience that can't even detect a knife poised at its
own throat.

Of course, experience has its value and its place. But this is a remarkably stupid
statement:

"The idea that “the people” will take
on and destroy “the establishment” is a utopian fantasy..."

Reforming the establishment is not the same thing as destroying the
establishment. It just looks like destruction to tea-sippers who admire
the Medici more than Samuel Adams or Andrew Jackson. The saddest part
of their ignorance is that it's clear they've never lived in a world of
profit and loss, where accountability can be determined in stark terms
and where sometimes the greatest, most productive changes can be
effected by those who enter a staid bureaucracy with fresh eyes and see
clearly, without the camouflage of convenient jargon or the grievous
half measures and failures perpetrated in the name of prudent
experience. American history is full of Sarah Palins. Many of our greatest moments have been achieved by raw talent and decency backed by unexpected courage.

And there's another essential ingredient of any political calculus that
has a chance at doing something more than mitigating compromise with
the leaden status quo; it's called winning. If you can't win the
opportunity, it doesn't matter how much experience you have. You won't
get the chance. That's one part of the equation Buckley never had to
worry about. He was able to rely for that on the troglodyte populists
who eventually enabled him to take credit for a generation of change he
never felt the need for as deeply as my father and grandfather did.

Success has many fathers. I don't object to Buckley's claims of
paternity with regard to conservatism as much as I do to those of the
David Brookses and Ross Douthats who would have us employ the tactics
of Neville Chamberlain to restore the polite defeatism of the
Rockefeller Republicans. And I damn well hate the snotty, superior tone
these small-minded men use to make their case for reduced expectations
and incrementally lessened socialism as the apogee of American
conservative aspirations.

To hell with the National Review and the Weekly Standard if they insist that our own candidates have to be able to sing Nessun Dorma to Charlie Gibson's satisfaction. He's never sung it to my satisfaction. And if he looked down his nose at me, I'd probably break it on the spot.

Some of us really don't give a rat's ass about what the ghost of Eric Severeid might think.